Inferring the Chinese State’s Personnel Strategy from Vacancy Chains, 1978 - 2012

Shilin Jia
University of Chicago

Bigger picture

  • Data: Inter-administration transfers of high-level Chinese political elites
  • RQ: Based on the transfer patterns of Chinese political elites, what can we say about the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s staffing strategy?

Perspectives

Two perspectives for studying mobility of elites

  • Individual perspective
    • views mobility from the perspective of the individual who moves through positions
    • important factors: loyalty, meritocracy, social capital
  • Organizational perspective
    • views mobility from the perspective of the organization responsible for filling positions, e.g. institutionalism
    • Our perspective: “Structure follows strategy” (Chandler 1990: 14)

Vacancy chains

  • People cannot freely move inside a system, but vacancies can (White 1970)

Research design

Data

  • Source: CVs of political elites of the Chinese Communist Party(CCP) (http://cped.nccu.edu.tw/)
  • Who are they?
    • Chinese political elites who have reached the level of vice-minister or vice-governor after (N ~ 4000)
  • Period: 1978-2011
  • Method: computer-assisted coding

Computer-assisted coding

Different types of organizational hires

  • Internal hires: specialization
  • External hires: integration
    • Isolated transfers
      • more likely initiated by locals an ad hoc bases
    • Chained transfers
      • more likely orchestrated by the state

Isolated vs. chained transfers

Manual checks by me and 3 research assistants

  • All chains and isolated transfers are complete

Bigger story

China’s transition to market economy

Organizational perspective

  • Departure point: Soviet planning system as a giant factory organized by central planning agencies
  • Decentralization as a solution (Chandler 1990; Fligstein 1985) and M-form transformation (Xu 2011; Qian and Weingast 1996, 1997)
    • Piecemeal transition, a ”dual-track” system (Naughton 1995; Shirk 1993)
    • Centrifugal force: decentralization (Landry, 2008); regional protection and bureaucratic fragmentation (Lieberthal 1992; Li and Bachman 1989)
    • Centripetal force: personnel management (Landry, 2008; Naughton and Yang 2004; Xu 2011)

CCP’s organizational strategy

  • nomenklatura (职务名称表)
  • reserved cadres (后备干部) and “third echelon” (第三梯队)
  • long-planned sponsorship through orchestrated transfers

Vacancy chains as strategy

Findings

Longer chain lengths over time

Orchestration: Longer lengths than expected by chance

  • Markovian (null) hypothesis: long chains were successions of independent isolated transfers

Expected chain lengths under Markovian models

More lateral transfers in vacancy chains

chain length demotion (%) lateral (%) promotion (%)
1 3.2 56.5 40.3
2 4.6 62.2 33.2
3 6.8 63.4 29.8
4 10.7 60.5 28.8
5 5.1 67.7 27.2
  • Administrative ranks
    • -1: No.1 person 一把手 (e.g. provincial party secretary, minister)
    • -1.5: No.2 person (e.g. governor, standing deputy minister)
    • -2: All positions at the vice-governor/deputy-minister level
    • -3: All sub-province/ministry-level positions

Where do vacancies start and where do they terminate?

  • In early periods, vacancies start in ministries and terminate in provinces
  • In later periods, vacancies start in provinces and are less likely to terminate.

Where do vacancies visit?

  • Centripetal force
    • The central state tries to penetrate its subunits through external transfers via vacancy chains
  • Centrifugal force
    • Powerful local strongholds (e.g. Shanghai and Guangdong) try to internally absorb their vacancies as much as possible

Organizational hieararchy

  • Assumption: head(unit \(i\)) \(\rightarrow\) head(unit \(j\)) implies \(i \leq j\) where the arrow means a top-level lateral transfer.
  • Ranking provinces and ministries through network triangularization (Jia and Xu 2018)
    • Decade ranks correlate with provincial per capita GDP at 0.6~0.7

Vacancy chains tend to start in high-ranking places, cascade downwards, and terminate in high-ranking places

They tend to terminate in high-ranking provinces

But not high-ranking ministries

Terminal probability by per capita GDP rank

Per capita GDP quintile 1 2 3 4 5
1978-1991 0.44 0.3 0.5 0.62 0.59
1992-2001 0.42 0.44 0.31 0.63 0.58
2002-2011 0.37 0.35 0.28 0.47 0.48
All 0.4 0.37 0.32 0.54 0.53

Let’s switch to the individual perspective

What happened to the elites involved in these transfers?

  • Suppression hypothesis: VCs transferred powerful elites out of their local bases
  • Sponsership hypothesis: By moving people (presumably pre-screened officials on reserved-cadre lists), VCs put them into faster career tracks

Short-term tradeoff

  • Mean des-ori status differential by admin rank differential by decade
    decade 1978-1991 1992-2001 2002-2011
    demotion 0.43 0.42 0.3
    lateral 0.19 0.06 0.09
    promotion -0.09 -0.13 -0.2

Short-term tradeoff

  • Higher trade-off for chained transfers (not shown in this presentation)
  • Still need to run some more regressions

Long-term benefit

  • The involved elites can also expect that their coming stops are not their final destinations but stepstones for further career advancement

Hypothesis: everything else being equal, an official involved in a longer chain should have a brighter future than his counterpart.

Regression

  • Unit of analysis: transfer-person
  • DV: Whether the person involved in a transfer is promoted in the next Party Congress.
  • IV: VC Length
  • Control: Current rank and destination

Results

Temporal effects

Summary

  • As China transitioned into decentralized market economy, the Party employed orchestrated vacancy chains to transfer its trusted elite members through a wide range of subunits
    • Strong provinces were, to some degree, more able to shield themselves
  • Elites involved in vacancy chains, in general, benefited from the transfers through either getting promotions or moving to better places
  • The VCs put those elites into strategic positions, not only for the present, but also for the future.
  • Strategy of organizational sponsorship